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Cherry Pie (Stone ripe cherries sweeten)
Stone ripe cherries; sweeten to taste; and sift a small quantity of flour over the fruit to thicken the juice. Bake in two crusts in the cooker for one hour.
Four lines of instruction assume you own a fireless cooker and already know how to build a pie. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box in which preheated soapstone or cast-iron discs were placed above and below the food, which then cooked on stored heat with no fire. The heat falls steadily throughout the hour, so a pie baked this way tends to come out cooked through but pale and soft-crusted; it is unlikely to brown or blister the way an oven crust does.
- Oven equivalentIn a conventional oven, a double-crust cherry pie wants 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and color the bottom crust, then 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until the juice bubbles thickly through the vents. The cooker's flat hour has no equivalent stage, which is why the results differ in texture.
- "Sweeten to taste"Judge by the cherries. Sour pie cherries need roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups sugar for 4 to 5 cups of fruit; sweet cherries need half that. Taste the raw fruit and sweeten toward tart, since baking concentrates it.
- "A small quantity of flour"For a 9-inch pie use 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour tossed with the sugar and fruit, not merely sifted over. Cherries throw a great deal of juice; less than that and the filling runs. Cornstarch at half the volume sets clearer if you prefer it.
- Two crustsEnough pastry for a 9-inch bottom and top, about 2 1/2 cups flour's worth. Cut vents in the lid regardless of method, or the steam lifts the crust off the filling.
- Stoning the cherriesA paperclip bent into a hook, or a proper cherry pitter, works faster than a knife and keeps the fruit whole. Reserve any juice that escapes and add it back with the sugar.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Let it stand at least two hours before cutting; cherry filling thickens as it cools and will run if served hot.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between about 1905 and the 1920s, promoted as a way to cook a full meal without keeping a coal or wood range burning through a summer afternoon. The cookers were sold commercially and also built at home from a packing crate, hay packing, and a pair of soapstone discs heated on the stovetop. Baking in one was always the stretch: the method suits stews, beans, cereals and steamed puddings, where long moist heat is a virtue, and it does poorly by pastry, which needs a hot, dry initial blast. That a pie recipe appears in this section at all says something about how thoroughly the fireless cooker was marketed as a replacement for the range rather than a supplement to it.